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Foreign Judges and Foreign Case Citations: A Study of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2025

Nuno Garoupa Open the ORCID record for Nuno Garoupa [Opens in a new window]  and
Weijia Rao
Nuno Garoupa
Affiliation:
George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, Arlington, VA, USA
Weijia Rao*
Affiliation:
Boston University School of Law, Boston, MA, USA
*
Corresponding author: Weijia Rao; Email: wrao@bu.edu
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Abstract

We study the value of foreign judges and foreign case citations for emerging courts in postcolonial democracies, with a specific focus on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeals (HKCFA). The HKCFA, Hong Kong’s highest appellate court since the transfer of its sovereignty to China, features foreign judges as full members of the court. Using a novel dataset of all publicly available HKCFA decisions from 1997 to 2020, we show that there is a significantly higher number of foreign case citations in cases where foreign judges have participated. Further analyses show that this correlation is stronger where the Hong Kong government is a disputing party, and more specifically, where the court rules in favor of the Hong Kong government. The findings are consistent with the possibility that foreign judges’ expertise in foreign case law is relevant for upholding the perception of the court’s independence from the executive branch. This explanation is in line with existing theories on the role of foreign judges on domestic courts.

Keywords

Foreign JudgesCitationForeign CasesHong KongJudicial Independence
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , First View , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association

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